Kathmandu, November 29

The first national teachers’ training on ‘Interactive Environmental Education and Local Curriculum on Environment’ began in Kathmandu today.

Nepal Prakriti Pathshala, a joint collaborative program of Wildlife Conservation Nepal and Danish Forestry Extension, Denmark in association with National Center for Educational Development today started the three-day teachers’ training at Dhapasi-based Tilingatar Higher Secondary School.

Although the organisers had invited 67 teachers from five districts for the training programme, only 50 could participate due to the bandh imposed by CPN-Maoist. Teachers were invited from districts including Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Lalitpur, Nuwakot and Rasuwa.

Subash C Kharel, Nature Interpreter at NPP, said the three-day training programme was part of the two-year training package for teachers of government schools. WCN had recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Education and concerned agencies like the NCED and the Curriculum Development Center to execute the national training by involving 1,053 Resource Centers of the DoE. The training programme will cover all the districts in the country within two years.

“Teachers are the main agents for raising awareness and creating behavioral change among the youth. To bring about this change, however, their teaching methods need to be more learner centric, action-oriented and should be focused more on encouraging students to make their own assessments and experiments,” he said.

He stated that since 2002, NPP has been focusing on building capacity of environment teachers in order to make environmental education more interactive in Nepal.WCN’s survey conducted during 2000 to 2008 showed that the mode of teaching of 80 per cent of the teachers who teach environment science, is very theoretical.

According to Kharel, the main objective of the training programme is to encourage interactive environmental education. Another major objective of the programme is to form an interactive network of skilled eco-teachers for sharing their experiences about interactive education.